14/06/2017

Lizzie Comes To Bridgetown/Bajan Heat/Auntie - 3 Barbadian Shorts

Because I couldn't find a feature-length film, nor a short that I could talk extensively about, I've pulled together 3 reviews of films from Barbados in an End Of The Week Shorts fashion.

A very strange introduction to Barbados.

This is a short animated film (quite possibly the first to have been made in Barbados) that is supposed to be apart of a series exploring Barbados' history. This episode is centred on Lord Nelson and his statue in country's capital.

With clunky writing and character animation, but some pretty impressive background work, Lizzie Comes to Bridgetown was weirdly enjoyable and maybe something worth checking out.

(The peculiar things I run into when looking through a country's filmography never ceases to amaze).

An all-round ok film - well shot, the cinematography is good, the acting holds up and the narrative is quite immersive thanks to the dense script that, though it is cliched, gives a good incite into the main character's perception. More than anything, however, this short film feels like a treatment, a teaser or an elongated trailer for a full feature-length movie - one that would be pretty uninteresting. In such, Bajan Heat is a run-of-the-mill crime thriller with one distinguishing element: it's set in Barbados.

The main take away I got from this film was then the idea that a lot more filmmakers and studio entities should think about making these condensed kind of films before executing a feature - it'd hopefully save us from a whole lot of boring tripe that's been dressed up by some flashy marketing.

With cinematic sensibilities that aren't too strong, yet a script that has heart, Auntie is a pretty good short with an unfortunate made-for-tv aesthetic. It depicts a relationship between a middle-aged woman, who is seen as an aunt figure, and a young girl that has been abandoned by her mother. The young girl awaits her estranged mother's package containing a ticket back home, but when it comes the aunt hides it - which results in conflict.

It would have been nice to better zoom in on themes of family and non-familial bonds as well as the irrationality of being drawn to a parental figure that is not present, but, because Auntie only touches on these ideas, it is clearly attempting to explore something it doesn't have the focus to depict.